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Friday, 2 August 2013

Timescales and Indie Authors - Guest post by Clare Davidson

There are lots of reasons why writers
decide to take the indie route, instead of the traditional one. One reason I’ve
heard several times is related to time scales: it’s much faster to release a
book as an indie author; you can get consecutive books in a series out quickly,
rather than making readers wait for a year or more.

This is absolutely true, but just because
we can get books out faster than traditionally published authors can, should
we?

When I set the release date for Trinity, it
was pretty much a spur of the moment decision. The book was “ready to go”. It
had been edited, proofread, formatted and had a gorgeous cover. There was no
reason not to release it, so I threw it out into the world a couple of weeks
later (the time needed to arrange a meal with friends and family to celebrate).

The problem was, I didn’t think about what
would happen next. I suddenly had a book out there, which wasn’t going to find
readers unless I promoted it. I did a bit of tweeting (I hate sales tweets, so
hardly ever do them) and scrambled to get a blog tour sorted out (which didn’t
happen until a few weeks later). I told my friends and family (over a lovely
meal in a local Chinese restaurant) and they told their friends too. It was
hardly an organised book launch and I’ll freely admit it showed in the sales
figures.

Promoting was my short cut. Some indie
authors take short cuts on other aspects – they don’t hire an editor or do the
proofreading themselves, for example. I wouldn’t recommend taking ANY
shortcuts.

Authors (of either variety) rely on readers
to be successful. Obviously, you need to get those readers to notice you and
your book(s) in the first place. Once you have readers, you don’t want to
alienate them because of sloppy editing or an abundance of grammatical or
spelling errors.

Yes, it’s good to get the next book in a
series out as quickly as possible, but I’m pretty sure most readers would
rather wait for a quality product, even if that does mean waiting a year (it’s
still a lot less time than a George R.R. Martin fan has to wait!).

This is just my opinion. I want to hear
yours. Do you think indie authors should get their books out as quickly as
possible, even if it means taking short cuts? Or are you happy to wait?

**Comment for a chance to win a funky mini-book keyring! **

One lucky winner will be chosen at random from the comments to win a mini-book keyring! Winner will be chosen at 9pm GMT on 6th August, so get commenting!

Clare Davidson is an independent writer, based in Lancaster. Clare is a high school teacher, mother and character-driven fantasy writer. Check out the cover for Clare's latest novel, REAPER'S RHYTHM, right here. You can get your copy in these places:

I totally agree spend the money and get your book professionally edited - nothing worse as a reader to finding tiny errors that could have been avoided. Trying to convince my bestie to pay an editor atm for her first upcoming novel ;))

Nothing worse then readinga book and the lead females name changes spelling throughout 6 chapters - I had to email the author - tell her how much I enjoyed but ..... informed her off this. She was very thankful ;)